Read Cosmopath - [Bengal Station 03] for Free Online Page A

Lewis-MacBride Agency. There were no witnesses and the police had little to go on, though they did say that they thought it likely the murder was linked to the killings of two other telepaths that week.
     
    She’d taken an interest in the case not just because it involved her line of work: she’d known one of the victims, Connors, when he’d worked for the Police Department in Kolkata before moving to Bengal Station.
     
    The killings so far, she knew, involved telepaths working on different cases for three different agencies... which made it hard to pin a motive on the killer. The only thing that linked the three dead men was their psi-ability.
     
    She knew that, rationally, she had no reason to worry - but she worried.
     
    Her aloo dhal arrived and she ate hungrily while watching the kaleidoscopic flow of citizens in the street outside.
     
    Her handset pinged with an incoming call. The sender’s name - Chandrasakar - flashed up, and she accepted it with a fluttery sense of excitement.
     
    His well-fed face smiled out at her.
     
    “My dear, delighted you can come along!”
     
    She laughed. “Try keeping me away, Rab.”
     
    “I’ll be on Bengal Station for a few days from tomorrow, overseeing the refit of a liner. Would you be able to get across? You can stay on the ship with me.”
     
    “Term’s just ended. I’m a free agent...” She tried not to smile at the terrible pun.
     
    “That’s wonderful. I’ll be in touch tomorrow. Everything okay with you?”
     
    She considered mentioning the murders and telling him not to worry, in case he’d heard about the killings, but decided against it. “I’m fine. Relieved that the term’s over for summer. No more lectures to prepare and dull papers to mark.”
     
    “And a vacation to look forward to,” he finished. “I must rush. See you soon.”
     
    She smiled. “Bye, Rab.”
     
    She finished the dhal. She thought about the mission to Delta Cephei VII, and then her thoughts returned to the killings. She was telling herself that she had nothing at all to worry about when she looked up and saw, striding past the restaurant, the tall Chinese guy she’d noticed in the café earlier.
     
    She thought it best to err on the side of caution. She paid for her meal and slipped from the restaurant through the rear entrance.
     
    She was in a narrow alley packed with citizens. If, in the unlikely event that the guy was an assassin, he would be unlikely to strike in the crowded streets of downtown Kolkata.
     
    His natural course of action, she reasoned, would be to make his way to her apartment, wait there, and strike when she returned.
     
    Her apartment was in a tenement block half a kay from here. She reckoned she could get there, do what she had to do, and get out again in minutes. She took a shortcut through the back alleys and reached her apartment five minutes later. She was sweating, and it had nothing to do with the stifling humidity that suffocated the city.
     
    She activated her security cams, both inside her rooms and out, circuited the signal through to her handset, then slipped out through the back entrance and down the fire-escape.
     
    A minute later she was sitting in a bar across the street, sipping a Blue Mountain beer and watching the streets for any sign of the Chinese guy.
     
    She was being paranoid, she told herself; and yet, mixed with the fear, she had to admit to feeling a frisson of excitement.
     
    She’d been recruited to the party in her early twenties, tested psi-positive, and given the cut five years later. At the time, she’d hoped that the augmentation would prove to be a way out of the cloistered groves of academia; she’d dreamed of thrilling missions and derring-do, especially after being sent on training courses to hone her self-defence... But her expectations had been based on too many sensational holo-movies as a kid. The work she’d been given had been routine surveillance, snooping and snitching, as she liked to